Scaling is the issue I have with things like Olark. One-to-one chat is an expensive way to get customers. Does anyone have experiences on the effectiveness and cost of customer acquisition using something like Olark?
[Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]
We brought on a dedicated sales guy last month and he's been using Olark. It's been successful and he's made sales right from the chat window.
We get about 300 uniques a day and he hasn't been overwhelmed at all.
The biggest issue (IMO) is making the distinction between sales and support. We don't use Olark for support (and don't want to). But for sales, it's awesome.
If the cost of offering chat is < value you get from chat it works out.
The trick is to understand that equation for your business.
We launched targeted chat to help you focus your chats on just particular visitors. One could argue that the value talking to customers who land on your pricing page, while ignoring everyone else always works out.
It depends on your business. I'm not an Olark user, but I've been running some back of the envelope calculations.
One year of the Bronze plan, at $180, is several orders of magnitude lower than my average customer lifetime value, so it's easily worth it, even if it only gains me 1 customer per year. Your mileage may vary.
But right now, most of my customers are coming through my email marketing, so I won't signup now. But I definitely will in a few months.
It can be tricky assigning a cost to something that's so important to a startup (customer development). In almost every startup I've been involved with, the engineers who spent the most time talking to customers ended up being the ones who created the most valuable features.
agreed. I think Live Chat is a great idea (I use it for my own product) for the customer development aspect. I was just saying there is an opportunity cost involved as well.
[Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]